Our second CSA box arrived this week bursting with spring treasures: chard, kale, strawberries, asparagus. I filled our refrigerator with happy sighs of contentment. The next day put an end to what had been an awfully long neglectful season, and we turned our attention to the garden in earnest. After reclaiming the beds from the disturbingly tall weeds, I harvested snow peas and arugula and baby kale. And then, after a visit yesterday to a neighbor's extraordinary, vibrant garden to borrow tomato cages, we returned home with two bags full of spring greens, turnips, and salad. And then? Then my happy satisfaction was strangely colored with a touch of anxiety. What to do with all that green? How, exactly, were we to eat all the glorious bounty before it went limp and lifeless?Yesterday might have been the most perfect day of the year: clear skies, sparkling sunshine, and blessedly low humidity. What's more, after the intensity of Mike's spring semester and a couple of weeks of traveling separately for various family commitments, we were finally all together on a Saturday morning with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Fantastic, right?
But for some reason the day felt difficult to me. I brought our ancient hand me down Trail-a-bike to the bike shop with all the adaptive parts I had recently tracked down, only to have the bike shop guy tell me it was impossible to retrofit. The Trail-a-bike was too old; a lost cause. I looked into his youthful, understanding blue eyes and muttered something pathetic and incoherent about how would I get Gabriel to summer camp now? My perfect transportation plans were ruined! I watched him wheel it to the shop's recycling pile, devastated. The situation merited a shrug and I responded with a wail. That's the way it was yesterday. In the midst of beautiful, temperate spring weather, free time, and ll four of us together, I was sensitive, quick to grumble, and completely incapable of coping with life's mini-disappointments.
Sometimes living with what you've been longing for is like that--rough going. Everything is as it should be, and yet...the children can still be so annoying! And I picked the wrong line at the store! And the Trail-a-bike is terminally busted. The bounty is supposed to be all pleasure, but damn if it doesn't take forever to wash the grit off the spinach.
I just had to get my bearings. Mike helped. By evening, I made peace with the fact (again) that the only truly good and meaningful stuff in life is hard. So I made a mountain of kale chips (garden kale makes the most delicate, extraordinary chips, irresistible even to my wary children) and we had dinner after kid bedtime, featuring lots of red wine, fantastic asparagus, potatoes roasted with oodles of chopped rosemary from the garden, and some much-needed adult conversation.
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